Business meetings where the differing perspectives of the participants provide the value of the meeting have been conducted for a long time. As the costs associated with travel have increased, companies have turned from face to face meetings to meetings allowing participants to be separately located, including telephone conferences, video conferences, and more recently through on-line meetings.
As traffic congestion grows in every part of the country, and software tools improve, companies worldwide are recognizing that it is possible to have effective meetings on-line. There are various forms of real-time, or on-line, collaboration. The simplest form is instant messaging. The ability of messaging software to tell another user who is available at a given moment is called “presence”. Presence awareness has been proven to eliminate up to 35% of voicemail, and as much as 30% of email, particularly long threaded discussions. Because of this, instant messaging has become the fastest growing form of communication in history. Gartner predicts over 200 million business users will be using some form of enterprise instant messaging by the end of 2005, an increase of over 100 million users from 2003.
Instant messaging has its roots in the consumer industry, but is virally working its way into corporations. Consumer messaging systems typically offer no security, no IT control over usage, and no reporting capabilities. Nor do consumer systems offer tracking history of conversations, a requirement of a number of federal statutes, from the SEC to Sarbanes-Oxley to the new medical HIPPA requirements. There are no clear leaders in the corporate instant messaging market, although the opportunity has been recently showcased by the entrance of Microsoft and IBM.
Oftentimes, messaging leads to the requirement for one or more meetings with the participants. Historically this required travel, which lengthened the business processes and significantly increased costs. With the advent of various forms of desktop application sharing, it is now possible for multiple users to “see” the same desktop at the same time. This “real-time” collaboration market is just emerging, and is estimated by Collaborative Strategies to be about a $6 billion market, with an average annual growth rate of 64% through 2005, and is expected to add 20 million users to its ranks in the next several years.
In a recent Deloitte Consulting survey of 300 of the Fortune 1000, collaboration was top priority with 75% of respondents. While less than 30% were using some form of collaborative tools today, 80% of respondents said they would implement some collaboration capability by 2005. According to a recent Yankee Group survey, companies will save $223B over next 5 years by collaborating over the Internet.
Because of the size of this emerging opportunity, Microsoft recently acquired a company called Placeware, for $180 million, to provide software for on-line meetings. Placeware has been renamed and is now being offered by Microsoft, coupled with Windows 2003 server, as Microsoft Live Meeting. Microsoft internally calculates that they will save over $43 million this year alone in time and travel costs if just 1 in 5 meetings are conducted on-line. Microsoft will spend over $300 million this year promoting Live Meeting, and joins IBM with its Lotus Sametime product, WebEx, and another 3 dozen smaller competitors.
The commonality of all of the collaboration products is that once the users begin their on-line meeting, they use a number of tools. Many of them require some form of application sharing, and all of them require some form of accompanying communication, from instant messaging to conference calls. Although instant messaging is sometimes used for extended conversations, most of the time the discussions are brief. ‘Conversations’ between a number of participants that become more involved are dependent upon the typing skills of each participant, which leads to the need for everyone to join in a conference call.
Similarly, real-time collaboration products imply the need for a conference call. MS Live Meeting, IBM Lotus Sametime, WebEx, and a host of other software products all make an assumption that once you are sharing a document or spreadsheet, the users are on a conference call so they can discuss it. This brings real value to the meeting, yet the integration of the call into the collaboration process has not yet been addressed.
In the past, the problem with integrating telephony products into software has centered on integration with the PBX. In large part this is because the call initiator's computer needed to pass the various telephony commands to the PBX, and no two PBX's are alike. This requires system integrators, and up until now has reduced the scalability of the opportunity.
Furthermore, most PBX systems can only join a few users in a conference call. They cannot join many parties, leaving the originators the option of creating either a “meet me’ or an operator assisted conference call. Because the users must typically dial a central number, such as a toll free number, and enter a passcode, it is difficult to make the calls spontaneous. Yet, the needs of both instant messaging and on-line meetings demand it.
A further concern arises regarding the security of a conference call using the call in model. Any caller knowing the call in number and passcode may enter into the conference call, without the knowledge of the other members of the call. Although it is possible for the call service to monitor the number of connections, the call service may be unable to ascertain the identity of callers, such as where the calling number is blocked. Furthermore, even if the identity of participants were disclosed to a call originator during a conference call, such information could be a distraction during the conference call.
Conference calls today fall into 2 categories:                1. “Meet Me” calls—These conference calls involve all users of the call dialing, via a publicly switched telephone network (hereafter “PSTN”), cellular telephone, or via a voice over internet protocol network, a central phone number or ANI to a conference bridge and entering a personal identification number (hereafter “PIN”) or pass code to join the call. These calls may be may be set up by an originating user by going to a web site to set up the call, through calling an operator and setting the call up, or setting up a static DNIS to which all users may dial on occasion.        2. Host-initiated Calls—These calls involve the host originating calls to all of the participants. In order to accomplish this, the host must initiate the call one of two ways:        a) either the host enters an ANI on his telephone and through pressing a combination of buttons has that party joined to the call, and repeats this process for each conference call participant, or;        b) the host types in the phone numbers of all the expected participants, either to a web site after which the web site will initiate a conference bridge and dial all the participants, or manually provides them to an operator who initiates the calls to the participants.        
These methods are inefficient, in that they require a conference call requester or party to the conference call to manually inform either the parties to the conference call, or the conference bridge itself, of parameters, passwords, and phone numbers for the call.
Instant messaging (hereafter “IM”) systems employ a client-server model on Internet protocol (hereafter “IP”) networks to deliver text chat and other information to distributed users in real-time. Instant Messaging client software may be loaded onto a user's workstation or may be used in a web browser, and may allow a user to log into a remote Instant Messaging server. Once a user has logged in, business rules may be used to determine which other users are available to communicate with the first user in the instant messaging system. Many IM systems allow users to create lists of other users that they commonly communicate with. When a user in such a list logs into the IM system, the server informs the list owner that a user in their list has logged on and is available to chat. In addition, Instant Messaging systems provide directory services that permit the users to search for another user. Once a user has the address of a second user, the first user can request a collaborative chat session with the second user. The second user can choose to either accept or reject the chat session. After the session has been accepted, the users may be able to communicate in a private or public chat session by typing text messages to one another. The message can be either transmitted through a central server, or directly between users (peer to peer) once the first user has determined the availability of the second user from the IM system. These chat sessions may take place over an unsecured IP network. Further extensions of IM allow multiple participants to be involved in a chat session.